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In my previous post I went through how we did the basic tracks (rhythm guitars, bass, drums and keyboards) on the demos of STUD 's upcoming 3rd album. In this post I will go forward and discuss the rest of the demo phase. We always do songs one at a time. The plan was to make the basic tracks and sometimes even the guitar solos on one Pro Tools session, and mix them down to a stereo track. Until this stage everything was done at my house. Next steps required the equipment to be carried to our rehearsal room for the vocal tracks. For this it was essential to have portable gear that was easy to carry back and forth. For the vocals I used a second Pro Tools session. The stereo track of the basic tracks was imported to this session and the vocals were recorded on top of that. This way there was no noticeable latency when recording, since all the tracks were audio tracks with minimum plugins used. In my previous post Getting the basic equipment for your recording project I went thr

Many people would argue against using a click track for recording. For us it has been the best decision we could have possibly made. We are lucky to have Stenda Kukkonen as STUD 's drummer. He's been playing to click for a long time and that allows us to do the same when recording. Before starting to record the tracks to a song it is very important to have the tempo of the song right. The best you can do is to play the songs with the band and try different tempos to see which works best. Even the smallest adjustments can matter. If the tempo is not right, playing the song can feel forced, whereas once you get it right, it feels easier to get into the groove of the song. Getting the tempo right should be done even before you start to make the demo of the song. Here's why: setting the right tempo and using the click track in both the demo and the actual recording, you can use some parts of the demoes for the real tracks. We did just that. Whole bunch of vocals, guitars an